New SEA-ME-WE cable via India

Neeraj Saxena, TNNSep 4, 2002, 08.37pm IST

NEW DELHI: Even as the world telecom market remains in a shambles, 13 telecom carrier companies have joined hands to set up a new submarine cable in another desperate attempt to ease the bandwidth shortage between Asia and Europe.

The consortium is led by Singapore Telecommunication (SingTel) and includes Tata-controlled Videsh Sanchar Nigam. VSNL's monetary commitment could not be immediately known.

The companies signed a memorandum of understanding in Indonesia to plan and initiate the construction of the new cable that will link South East Asia, the Middle-East and Western Europe.

With a proposed design capacity of 1.28 terabits per second, the cable project will be built using dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology.

The proposed network will provide much needed bandwidth as the existing cables along the same route are increasingly becoming saturated.

The promoters of the project believe that the new cable will be in a prime position to capture a sizable share of traffic between Asia, the Middle-East and Europe when the market conditions improve.

At present, data traffic from South-East Asia and the Middle-East to Europe is routed via smaller capacity cables, mainly SEA-ME-WE 3 and FLAG.

There is a serious dearth for quality bandwidth in India. As per National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), the total bandwidth consumed in the country for Internet, voice, leased line and international private leased circuits is about 8 giga bit per second (the speed at which data is transferred).

The country has so far received terrestrial bandwidth only from the monopoly provider VSNL which gets it from two cable projects. SEA-ME-WE 3 that lands at Kochi has a capacity of 20 GBPS, of which VSNL has got 1 GB available to it, in proportion to its investment in the promoting consortium.

FLAG (Fibre Link Around the Globe) that lands at Mumbai also offers some bandwidth to VSNL. But the supply is far inadequate compared to the demand that is expected be as high as 70 GBPS by 2005, according to Nasscom's estimates.

FLAG, which connects to the UK and Japan, has a 10 GBPS capacity to offer. But it still can't provide bandwidth directly to customers such as ISPs and corporates in India.

In January this year, the union communications and information technology minister Pramod Mahajan had announced that in addition to VSNL, FLAG would also be allowed to sell bandwidth to customers from April 1. But that has not happened.

It is VSNL which owns the international gateway in Mumbai and is yet to specify to FLAG its terms and conditions for access of the gateway. As a result, FLAG can't fix its rates to sell directly to customers like ISPs, data centres, call centres and others.

India's submarine bandwidth game has also suffered a serious dent with the other three companies like Bharti Tele-Ventures, Teleglobe and Dishnet suffering setbacks and delays. These three companies had planned mega submarine cable projects.